Emoji not displaying in the Standard Notes desktop Mac app
On my main (M4) Mac, I don't use any Apple services or software; I'm not logged into iCloud, and run LittleSnitch to prevent analytics being sent to Apple. I also enabled Apple's Lockdown Mode, because I figured why not, when I'm not using any of Apple's services anyway. I haven't yet upgraded to macOS 26 Tahoe, so I'm still on Sequoia. Apple are still updating it (15.7.3 was released just two months ago), so I'm happy to stick with the stability I have for now.
My notes app of choice is Standard Notes, which is End-to-end encrypted (E2EE), and is now owned by Proton. I do all of my writing in it, and it's cross-platform, so it also works on my other (M1) Mac running Asahi Linux.
Many of my notes have emoji as part of the title, to enable easy recognition of the ones I use most often. Just over a year ago, when I bought this machine, it was really puzzling why I was getting no emoji appearing in Standard Notes.
Opening standardnotes.com in a browser showed the emoji fine, but the standalone app install didn't. I tried reinstalling, downloading it directly (I install all of my software through Homebrew), but nothing worked. I even booted my M1 into macOS to check it there, and it worked fine. I was stumped.
I left it, and set it up as a Web App in Orion Browser instead. Web Apps appear in the dock as separate app icons, so it's mostly the same anyway.
Fast forward nearly a year later, and I decided to troubleshoot it again, this time with Claude (through Kagi Assistant). It turns out the culprit is Lockdown Mode. Turned it off, rebooted, and there my emoji were.
I found a closed Github issue on the subject, as it seems it affects many Electron apps in Sequoia. There's also a closed Github issue for Tahoe, so it looks like a change in behaviour is not planned.
Apple on their support article about Lockdown Mode (linked above) only say:
Web browsing: Certain complex web technologies are blocked, which might cause some websites to load more slowly or not operate correctly. In addition, web fonts might not be displayed, and images might be replaced with a missing image icon.
As nobody I've found has mentioned Standard Notes by name, I thought I'd write this blog post in case anybody else has the issue.